Trust charged for information

EDITOR, - While most of us welcome the fact that the NHS reforms have made hospitals carefully consider their income and expenditure, I have recently been made aware of an unpleasant side of the new business environment. Three representatives from our hospital recently attended a meeting sponsored by South East Thames region on developing profiles of care. The meeting was chaired by a clinician from an NHS trust where profiles of care are well developed, and the benefits to staff and patients became evident during the day. Because our hospital has just started to develop profiles of care, our audit coordinator later contacted the trust concerned to see whether two or three of us could visit and talk informally to some of the relevant clinicians to gain a further understanding of the process and see how they made the system work. We were told, however, that, though this was possible, the trust would charge £300 for the information and visit.

As both hospitals are NHS hospitals, trust or not, I would have thought that we could be said to have a right of access to information designed to benefit NHS patients irrespective of where they are treated. Why should we have to pay not to reinvent the wheel? I cannot understand how the system can allow £300 of taxpayers' money designed for patients' care to be shunted between one trust and another. My understanding of the reforms is that trusts cover their costs but do not make profits. I wonder if this new business approach will also apply to clinical information in the future, with trusts attempting to levy charges on journals for clinical research published from their units?

This dangerous precedent serves to underline the commercial attitudes engendered in many trusts' executive boards, which eventually must compromise patients' care.